Read Ebook: The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition Vol. 01 of 12) by Frazer James George
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In Burma a rejected lover sometimes resorts to a sorcerer and engages him to make a small image of the scornful fair one, containing a piece of her clothes, or of something which she has been in the habit of wearing. Certain charms or medicines also enter into the composition of the doll, which is then hung up or thrown into the water. As a consequence the girl is supposed to go mad. In this last example, as in the first of the Malay charms noticed above, homoeopathic or imitative magic is blent with contagious magic in the strict sense of the word, since the likeness of the victim contains something which has been in contact with her person. A Matabele who wishes to avenge himself on an enemy makes a clay figure of him and pierces it with a needle; next time the man thus represented happens to engage in a fight he will be speared, just as his effigy was stabbed. The Ovambo of South-western Africa believe that some people have the power of bewitching an absent person by gazing into a vessel full of water till his image appears to them in the water; then they spit at the image and curse the man, and that seals his fate.
In modern India the practices described in these old books are still carried on with mere variations of detail. The magician compounds the fatal image of earth taken from sixty-four filthy places, and mixed up with clippings of hair, parings of nails, bits of leather, and so on. Upon the breast of the image he writes the name of his enemy; then he pierces it through and through with an awl, or maims it in various ways, hoping thus to maim or kill the object of his vengeance. Among the Nambutiris of Malabar a figure representing the enemy to be destroyed is drawn on a small sheet of metal, gold by preference, on which some mystic diagrams are also inscribed. The sorcerer then declares that the bodily injury or death of the person shall take place at a certain time. After that he wraps up the little sheet in another sheet or leaf of metal , and buries it in a place where the victim is expected to pass. Sometimes instead of a small sheet of metal he buries a live frog or lizard enclosed in a coco-nut shell, after sticking nails into its eyes and stomach. At the same moment that the animal dies the person expires also. Among the Mohammedans of Northern India the proceeding is as follows. A doll is made of earth taken from a grave or from a place where bodies are cremated, and some sentences of the Coran are read backwards over twenty-one small wooden pegs. These pegs the operator next strikes into various parts of the body of the image, which is afterwards shrouded like a corpse, carried to a graveyard, and buried in the name of the enemy whom it is intended to injure. The man, it is believed, will die without fail after the ceremony. A slightly different form of the charm is observed by the B?m-Margi, a very degraded sect of Hindoos in the North-West Provinces. To kill an enemy they make an image of flour or earth, and stick razors into the breast, navel, and throat, while pegs are thrust into the eyes, hands, and feet. As if this were not enough, they next construct an image of Bhairava or Durga holding a three-pronged fork in her hand; this they place so close to the effigy of the person to whom mischief is meant that the fork penetrates its breast. To injure a person a Singhalese sorcerer will procure a lock of his intended victim's hair, a paring of his nails, or a thread of his garment. Then he fashions an image of him and thrusts nails made of five metals into the joints. All these he buries where the unfortunate man is likely to pass. No sooner has he done so than the victim falls ill with swelling or stiffness of joints, or burning sensations in the body, or disfigurements of the mouth, legs, and arms.
Nowhere, perhaps, were the magic arts more carefully cultivated, nowhere did they enjoy greater esteem or exercise a deeper influence on the national life than in the land of the Pharaohs. Little wonder, therefore, that the practice of enchantment by means of images was familiar to the wizards of Egypt. A drop of a man's blood, some clippings of his hair or parings of his nails, a rag of the garment which he had worn, sufficed to give a sorcerer complete power over him. These relics of his person the magician kneaded into a lump of wax, which he moulded into the likeness and dressed after the fashion of his intended victim, who was then at the mercy of his tormentor. If the image was exposed to the fire, the person whom it represented straightway fell into a burning fever; if it were stabbed with a knife, he felt the pain of the wound. Thus, for instance, a certain superintendent of the king's cattle was once prosecuted in an Egyptian court of law for having made figures of men and women in wax, thereby causing paralysis of their limbs and other grievous bodily harm. He had somehow obtained a book of magic which contained the spells and directions how to act in reciting them. Armed with this powerful instrument the rogue had shut himself up in a secret chamber, and there proceeded to cast spells over the people of his town. In ancient Babylonia also it was a common practice to make an image of clay, pitch, honey, fat, or other soft material in the likeness of an enemy, and to injure or kill him by burning, burying, or otherwise ill-treating it. Thus in a hymn to the fire-god Nusku we read:
But both in Babylon and in Egypt this ancient tool of superstition, so baneful in the hands of the mischievous and malignant, was also pressed into the service of religion and turned to glorious account for the confusion and overthrow of demons. In a Babylonian incantation we meet with a long list of evil spirits whose effigies were burnt by the magician in the hope that, as their images melted in the fire, so the fiends themselves might melt away and disappear. Every night when the sun-god Ra sank down to his home in the glowing west he was assailed by hosts of demons under the leadership of the arch-fiend Apepi. All night long he fought them, and sometimes by day the powers of darkness sent up clouds even into the blue Egyptian sky to obscure his light and weaken his power. To aid the sun-god in this daily struggle, a ceremony was daily performed in his temple at Thebes. A figure of his foe Apepi, represented as a crocodile with a hideous face or a serpent with many coils, was made of wax, and on it the demon's name was written in green ink. Wrapt in a papyrus case, on which another likeness of Apepi had been drawn in green ink, the figure was then tied up with black hair, spat upon, hacked with a stone knife, and cast on the ground. There the priest trod on it with his left foot again and again, and then burned it in a fire made of a certain plant or grass. When Apepi himself had thus been effectually disposed of, waxen effigies of each of his principal demons, and of their fathers, mothers, and children, were made and burnt in the same way. The service, accompanied by the recitation of certain prescribed spells, was repeated not merely morning, noon, and night, but whenever a storm was raging, or heavy rain had set in, or black clouds were stealing across the sky to hide the sun's bright disc. The fiends of darkness, clouds, and rain felt the injuries inflicted on their images as if they had been done to themselves; they passed away, at least for a time, and the beneficent sun-god shone out triumphant once more.
If homoeopathic or imitative magic, working by means of images, has commonly been practised for the spiteful purpose of putting obnoxious people out of the world, it has also, though far more rarely, been employed with the benevolent intention of helping others into it. In other words, it has been used to facilitate childbirth and to procure offspring for barren women. Thus among the Esquimaux of Bering Strait a barren woman desirous of having a son will consult a shaman, who commonly makes, or causes her husband to make, a small doll-like image over which he performs certain secret rites, and the woman is directed to sleep with it under her pillow. Amongst the many ceremonies which a Thompson Indian girl of British Columbia had formerly to perform at puberty was the following. She had to run four times in the morning, carrying two small stones which had been obtained from underneath the water. These were put in her bosom; and as she ran, they slipped down between her body and her clothes and fell to the ground. While she ran, she prayed to the Dawn that when she should be with child she might be delivered as easily as she had been delivered of these stones. Similarly among the Haida Indians of the Queen Charlotte Islands a pregnant woman would let round stones, eels, chips, or other small objects slip down over her abdomen for the sake of facilitating her delivery. Among the Nishinam Indians of California, when a woman is childless, her female friends sometimes make out of grass a rude image of a baby and tie it in a small basket after the Indian fashion. Some day, when the woman is from home, they lay this grass baby in her hut. On finding it she holds it to her breast, pretends to nurse it, and sings it lullabies. This is done as a charm to make her conceive. The Huichol Indians of Mexico believe in a certain Mother who is the goddess of conception and childbirth, and lives in a cave near Santa Catarina. A woman desirous of offspring deposits in this cave a doll made of cotton cloth to represent the baby on which her heart is set. After a while she goes back to the cave, puts the doll under her girdle, and soon afterwards is supposed to be pregnant. With a like intent Indian women in Peru used to wrap up stones like babies and leave them at the foot of a large stone, which they revered for this purpose. Among the Makatisses, a Caffre tribe of South Africa, a traveller observed a woman carefully tending a doll made out of a gourd, adorned with necklaces of glass beads, and heavily weighted with iron ore. On enquiry he learned that she had been directed by the medicine-man to do this as a means of obtaining a child. Among the Basutos childless wives make rude effigies of clay, and give them the name of some tutelar deity. They treat these dolls as if they were real children, and beseech the divinity to whom they have dedicated them to grant them the power of conception. In Anno, a district of West Africa, women may often be seen carrying wooden dolls strapped, like babies, on their backs as a cure for sterility. In Japan, when a marriage is unfruitful, the old women of the neighbourhood come to the house and go through a pretence of delivering the wife of a child. The infant is represented by a doll. The Maoris had a household god whose image was in the form of an infant. The image was very carefully made, generally life-size, and adorned with the family jewels. Barren women nursed it and addressed it in the most endearing terms in order to become mothers.
Among the Battas of Sumatra a barren woman, who would become a mother, will make a wooden image of a child and hold it in her lap, believing that this will lead to the fulfilment of her wish. In the Babar Archipelago, when a woman desires to have a child, she invites a man who is himself the father of a large family to pray on her behalf to Upulero, the spirit of the sun. A doll is made of red cotton, which the woman clasps in her arms as if she would suckle it. Then the father of many children takes a fowl and holds it by the legs to the woman's head, saying, "O Upulero, make use of the fowl; let fall, let descend a child, I beseech you, I entreat you, let a child fall and descend into my hands and on my lap." Then he asks the woman, "Has the child come?" and she answers, "Yes, it is sucking already." After that the man holds the fowl on the husband's head, and mumbles some form of words. Lastly, the bird is killed and laid, together with some betel, on the domestic place of sacrifice. When the ceremony is over, word goes about in the village that the woman has been brought to bed, and her friends come and congratulate her. Here the pretence that a child has been born is a purely magical rite designed to secure, by means of imitation or mimicry, that a child really shall be born; but an attempt is made to add to the efficacy of the rite by means of prayer and sacrifice. To put it otherwise, magic is here blent with and reinforced by religion. In Saibai, one of the islands in Torres Straits, a similar custom of purely magical character is observed, without any religious alloy. Here, when a woman is pregnant, all the other women assemble. The husband's sister makes an image of a male child and places it before the pregnant woman; afterwards the image is nursed until the birth of the child in order to ensure that the baby shall be a boy. To secure male offspring a woman will also press to her abdomen a fruit resembling the male organ of generation, which she then passes to another woman who has borne none but boys. This, it is clear, is imitative magic in a slightly different form. In the seventh month of a woman's pregnancy common people in Java observe a ceremony which is plainly designed to facilitate the real birth by mimicking it. Husband and wife repair to a well or to the bank of a neighbouring river. The upper part of the woman's body is bare, but young banana leaves are fastened under her arms, a small opening, or rather fold, being left in the leaves in front. Through this opening or fold in the leaves on his wife's body the husband lets fall from above a weaver's shuttle. An old woman receives the shuttle as it falls, takes it up in her arms and dandles it as if it were a baby, saying, "Oh, what a dear little child! Oh, what a beautiful little child!" Then the husband lets an egg slip through the fold, and when it lies on the ground as an emblem of the afterbirth, he takes his sword and cuts through the banana leaf at the place of the fold, obviously as if he were severing the navel-string. Persons of high rank in Java observe the ceremony after a fashion in which the real meaning of the rite is somewhat obscured. The pregnant woman is clothed in a long robe, which her husband, kneeling before her, severs with a stroke of his sword from bottom to top. Then he throws his sword on the ground and runs away as fast as he can. According to another account, the woman is wrapt round with white thread; her husband cuts it with his sword, throws away an oblong white gourd, dashes a fowl's egg to the ground, rolls along a young coco-nut on which the figures of a man and woman have been painted, and so departs in haste. Among some of the Dyaks of Borneo, when a woman is in hard labour, a wizard is called in, who essays to facilitate the delivery in a rational manner by manipulating the body of the sufferer. Meantime another wizard outside the room exerts himself to attain the same end by means which we should regard as wholly irrational. He, in fact, pretends to be the expectant mother; a large stone attached to his stomach by a cloth wrapt round his body represents the child in the womb, and, following the directions shouted to him by his colleague on the real scene of operations, he moves this make-believe baby about on his body in exact imitation of the movements of the real baby till the infant is born.
The same principle of make-believe, so dear to children, has led other peoples to employ a simulation of birth as a form of adoption, and even as a mode of restoring a supposed dead person to life. If you pretend to give birth to a boy, or even to a great bearded man who has not a drop of your blood in his veins, then, in the eyes of primitive law and philosophy, that boy or man is really your son to all intents and purposes. Thus Diodorus tells us that when Zeus persuaded his jealous wife Hera to adopt Hercules, the goddess got into bed, and clasping the burly hero to her bosom, pushed him through her robes and let him fall to the ground in imitation of a real birth; and the historian adds that in his own day the same mode of adopting children was practised by the barbarians. At the present time it is said to be still in use in Bulgaria and among the Bosnian Turks. A woman will take a boy whom she intends to adopt and push or pull him through her clothes; ever afterwards he is regarded as her very son, and inherits the whole property of his adoptive parents. Among the Berawans of Sarawak, when a woman desires to adopt a grown-up man or woman, a great many people assemble and have a feast. The adopting mother, seated in public on a raised and covered seat, allows the adopted person to crawl from behind between her legs. As soon as he appears in front he is stroked with the sweet-scented blossoms of the areca palm, and tied to the woman. Then the adopting mother and the adopted son or daughter, thus bound together, waddle to the end of the house and back again in front of all the spectators. The tie established between the two by this graphic imitation of childbirth is very strict; an offence committed against an adopted child is reckoned more heinous than one committed against a real child. In Central Africa "the Bahima practise adoption; the male relatives always take charge of a brother's children. When a man dies his brother takes any children of the deceased and places them one by one in his wife's lap. Then he binds round her waist the thong used for tying the legs of restive cows during milking, just as is done after childbirth. The children are then brought up with his own family." In ancient Greece any man who had been supposed erroneously to be dead, and for whom in his absence funeral rites had been performed, was treated as dead to society till he had gone through the form of being born again. He was passed through a woman's lap, then washed, dressed in swaddling-clothes, and put out to nurse. Not until this ceremony had been punctually performed might he mix freely with living folk. In ancient India, under similar circumstances, the supposed dead man had to pass the first night after his return in a tub filled with a mixture of fat and water; there he sat with doubled-up fists and without uttering a syllable, like a child in the womb, while over him were performed all the sacraments that were wont to be celebrated over a pregnant woman. Next morning he got out of the tub and went through once more all the other sacraments he had formerly partaken of from his youth up; in particular, he married a wife or espoused his old one over again with due solemnity.
Amongst the Akikuyu of British East Africa every member of the tribe, whether male or female, has to go through a pretence of being born again. The age at which the ceremony is performed varies with the ability of the father to provide the goat or sheep which is required for the due observance of the rite; but it seems that the new birth generally takes place when a child is about ten years old or younger. If the child's father or mother is dead, a man or woman acts as proxy on the occasion, and in such a case the woman is thenceforth regarded by the child as its own mother. A goat or sheep is killed in the afternoon and the stomach and intestines are reserved. The ceremony takes place at evening in a hut; none but women are allowed to be present. A circular piece of the goat-skin or sheep-skin is passed over one shoulder and under the other arm of the child who is to be born again; and the animal's stomach is similarly passed over the child's other shoulder and under its other arm. The mother, or the woman who acts as mother, sits on a hide on the floor with the child between her knees. The sheep's or goat's gut is passed round her and brought in front of the child. She groans as if in labour, another woman cuts the gut as if it were the navel-string, and the child imitates the cry of a new-born infant. Until a lad has thus been born again in mimicry, he may not assist at the disposal of his father's body after death, nor help to carry him out into the wilds to breathe his last. Formerly the ceremony of the new birth was combined with the ceremony of circumcision; but the two are now kept separate. In origin we may suppose that this curious pretence of being born again regularly formed part of the initiatory rites through which every Kikuyu lad and every Kikuyu girl had to pass before he or she was recognised as a full-grown member of the tribe; for in many parts of the world a simulation of death and resurrection has been enacted by candidates on such occasions as well as on admission to the membership of certain secret societies. The intention of the mock birth or mock resurrection is not clear; but we may conjecture that it is designed, on the principles of homoeopathic or imitative magic, either to impart to the candidate the powers of a ghost or to enable him to be reborn again into the world whenever he shall have died in good earnest.
The natives of New Caledonia make use of effigies to maintain or restore harmony between husband and wife. Two spindle-shaped bundles, one representing the man and the other the woman, are tied firmly together to symbolise and ensure the amity of the couple. They are made up of various plants, together with some threads from the woman's girdle and a piece of the man's apron; a bone needle forms the axis of each. The talisman is meant to render the union of the spouses indissoluble, and is carefully treasured by them both. If, nevertheless, a domestic jar should unfortunately take place, the husband repairs to the family burying-ground with the precious packet. There he lights a fire with a wood of a particular kind, fumigates the talisman, sprinkles it with water from a prescribed source, waves it round his head, and then stirring the needle in the bundle which represents himself he says, "I change the heart of this woman, that she may love me." If the wife still remains obdurate, he ties a sugar-cane to the bundle, and presents it to her through a third person. If she eats of the sugar-cane, she feels her love for her husband revive. On her side she has the right to operate in like manner on the bundle which represents herself, always provided that she does not go to the burying-ground, which is strictly forbidden to women.
Another beneficent use of homoeopathic magic is to heal or prevent sickness. In ancient Greece, when a man died of dropsy, his children were made to sit with their feet in water until the body was burned. This was supposed to prevent the disease from attacking them. Similarly, on the principle of water to water, among the natives of the hills near Rajamahall in India, the body of a person who has died of dropsy is thrown into a river; they think that if the corpse were buried, the disorder would return and carry off other people.
A curious application of homoeopathic magic to the cure of disease is founded on the old English superstition that if a shrew-mouse runs over a beast, be it horse, cow, or sheep, the animal suffers cruelly and may lose the use of its limb. Against this accident the farmer used to keep a shrew-ash at hand as a remedy. A shrew-ash was prepared thus. A deep hole was bored in the tree, and a shrew-mouse was thrust in alive and plugged in, probably with some incantations which have been forgotten. An ancient Indian cure for a scanty crop of hair was to pour a solution of certain plants over the head of the patient; this had to be done by a doctor who was dressed in black and had eaten black food, and the ceremony must be performed in the early morning, while the stars were fading in the sky, and before the black crows had risen cawing from their nests. The exact virtue of these plants has escaped our knowledge, but we can hardly doubt that they were dark and hairy; while the black clothes of the doctor, his black food, and the swarthy hue of the crows unquestionably combined to produce a crop of black hair on the patient's head. A more disagreeable means of attaining the same end is adopted by some of the tribes of Central Australia. To promote the growth of a boy's hair a man with flowing locks bites the youth's scalp as hard as he can, being urged thereto by his friends, who sit round watching him at his task, while the sufferer howls aloud with pain. Clearly, on the principle of capillary attraction, if I may say so, he thus imparts of his own mature abundance to the scarcity of his youthful friend.
One of the great merits of homoeopathic magic is that it enables the cure to be performed on the person of the doctor instead of on that of his victim, who is thus relieved of all trouble and inconvenience, while he sees his medical man writhe in anguish before him. For example, the peasants of Perche, in France, labour under the impression that a prolonged fit of vomiting is brought about by the patient's stomach becoming unhooked, as they call it, and so falling down. Accordingly, a practitioner is called in to restore the organ to its proper place. After hearing the symptoms he at once throws himself into the most horrible contortions, for the purpose of unhooking his own stomach. Having succeeded in the effort, he next hooks it up again in another series of contortions and grimaces, while the patient experiences a corresponding relief. Fee five francs. In like manner a Dyak medicine-man, who has been fetched in a case of illness, will lie down and pretend to be dead. He is accordingly treated like a corpse, is bound up in mats, taken out of the house, and deposited on the ground. After about an hour the other medicine-men loose the pretended dead man and bring him to life; and as he recovers, the sick person is supposed to recover too. A cure for a tumour, based on the principle of homoeopathic magic, is prescribed by Marcellus of Bordeaux, court physician to Theodosius the First, in his curious work on medicine. It is as follows. Take a root of vervain, cut it across, and hang one end of it round the patient's neck, and the other in the smoke of the fire. As the vervain dries up in the smoke, so the tumour will also dry up and disappear. If the patient should afterwards prove ungrateful to the good physician, the man of skill can avenge himself very easily by throwing the vervain into water; for as the root absorbs the moisture once more, the tumour will return. The same sapient writer recommends you, if you are troubled with pimples, to watch for a falling star, and then instantly, while the star is still shooting from the sky, to wipe the pimples with a cloth or anything that comes to hand. Just as the star falls from the sky, so the pimples will fall from your body; only you must be very careful not to wipe them with your bare hand, or the pimples will be transferred to it.
Further, homoeopathic and in general sympathetic magic plays a great part in the measures taken by the rude hunter or fisherman to secure an abundant supply of food. On the principle that like produces like, many things are done by him and his friends in deliberate imitation of the result which he seeks to attain; and, on the other hand, many things are scrupulously avoided because they bear some more or less fanciful resemblance to others which would really be disastrous.
Thus among the Arunta the men of the witchetty grub totem perform a series of elaborate ceremonies for multiplying the grub which the other members of the tribe use as food. One of the ceremonies is a pantomime representing the fully-developed insect in the act of emerging from the chrysalis. A long narrow structure of branches is set up to imitate the chrysalis case of the grub. In this structure a number of men, who have the grub for their totem, sit and sing of the creature in its various stages. Then they shuffle out of it in a squatting posture, and as they do so they sing of the insect emerging from the chrysalis. This is supposed to multiply the numbers of the grubs. Again, in order to multiply emus, which are an important article of food, the men of the emu totem in the Arunta tribe proceed as follows. They clear a small spot of level ground, and opening veins in their arms they let the blood stream out until the surface of the ground, for a space of about three square yards, is soaked with it. When the blood has dried and caked, it forms a hard and fairly impermeable surface, on which they paint the sacred design of the emu totem, especially the parts of the bird which they like best to eat, namely, the fat and the eggs. Round this painting the men sit and sing. Afterwards performers, wearing head-dresses to represent the long neck and small head of the emu, mimic the appearance of the bird as it stands aimlessly peering about in all directions. Again, men of the hakea flower totem in the Arunta tribe perform a ceremony to make the hakea tree burst into blossom. The scene of the ceremony is a little hollow, by the side of which grows an ancient hakea tree. In the middle of the hollow is a small worn block of stone, supposed to represent a mass of hakea flowers. Before the ceremony begins, an old man of the totem carefully sweeps the ground clean, and then strokes the stone all over with his hands. After that the men sit round the stone and chant invitations to the tree to flower much and to the blossoms to be filled with honey. Finally, at the request of the old leader, one of the young men opens a vein in his arm and lets the blood flow freely over the stone, while the rest continue to sing. The flow of blood is supposed to represent the preparation of the favourite drink of the natives, which is made by steeping the hakea flower in water. As soon as the stone is covered with blood the ceremony is complete. Again, the men of the kangaroo totem in the Arunta tribe perform ceremonies for the multiplication of kangaroos at a certain rocky ledge, which, in the opinion of the natives, is full of the spirits of kangaroos ready to go forth and inhabit kangaroo bodies. A little higher up on the hillside are two blocks of stone, which represent a male and female kangaroo respectively. At the ceremony these two blocks are rubbed with a stone by two men. Then the rocky ledge below is decorated with alternate vertical stripes of red and white, to indicate the red fur and white bones of the kangaroo. After that a number of young men sit on the ledge, open veins in their arms, and allow the blood to spurtle over the edge of the rock on which they are seated. This pouring out of the blood of the kangaroo men on the rock is thought to drive out the spirits of the kangaroos in all directions, and so to increase the number of the animals. While it is taking place, the other men sit below watching the performers and singing songs which refer to the expected increase of kangaroos. In the Kaitish tribe, when the headman of the grass seed totem wishes to make the grass grow, he takes two sacred sticks or stones of the well-known bull-roarer pattern, smears them with red-ochre, and decorates them with lines and dots of down to represent grass seed. Then he rubs the sticks or stones together so that the down flies off in all directions. The down is supposed to carry with it some virtue from the sacred stick or stone whereby the grass seed is made to grow. For days afterwards the headman walks about by himself in the bush singing the grass seed and carrying one of the sacred bull-roarers with him. At night he hides the implement in the bush and returns to camp, where he may have no intercourse with his wife. For during all this time he is believed to be so full of magic power, derived from the bull-roarer, that if he had intercourse with her the grass seed would not grow properly and his body would swell up when he tasted of it. When the seed begins to grow, he still goes on singing to make it grow more, but when it is fully grown he brings back the sacred implement to his camp hidden in bark; and having gathered a store of the seed he leaves it with the men of the other half of the tribe, saying, "You eat the grass seed in plenty, it is very good and grows in my country."
Again, in a rocky gorge of the Murchison Range there are numbers of little heaps of rounded, water-worn stones, carefully arranged on beds of leaves and hidden away under piles of rougher quartzite blocks. In the opinion of the Warramunga tribe, these rounded stones represent euros, that is, a species of kangaroo. According to their size they stand for young or old, male or female euros. Any old man of the euro totem who happens to pass the spot may take the stones out, smear them with red ochre and rub them well. This is supposed to cause the spirits of euros to pass out from the stones and to be born as animals, thus increasing the food supply. Again, in the Warramunga tribe Messrs. Spencer and Gillen saw and heard a ceremony which was believed to multiply white cockatoos to a wonderful extent. From ten o'clock one evening until after sunrise next morning the headman of the white cockatoo totem held in his hand a rude effigy of the cockatoo and imitated the harsh cry of the bird, with exasperating monotony, all night long. When his voice failed him, his son took up the call and relieved the old man until such time as his father was rested enough to begin again.
In this last ceremony the homoeopathic or imitative character of the rite is particularly plain: the shape of the bird which is to be multiplied is mimicked by an effigy, its cry is imitated by the human voice. In others of the ceremonies just described the homoeopathic principle works by means of stones, which resemble in shape the edible animals or plants that the natives desire to increase. We shall see presently that the Melanesians similarly attribute fertilising virtues to stones of certain shapes. Meantime it deserves to be noticed that in some of these Australian rites for the multiplication of the totemic animals the blood of the men of the totem plays an important part. Similarly in a ceremony performed by men of the Dieri tribe for the multiplication of carpet-snakes and iguanas the performers wound themselves and the blood that drips from their wounds is poured on a sandhill in which a mythical ancestor is believed to be buried and from which carpet-snakes and iguanas are confidently expected to swarm forth. Again, when the headman of the fish totem in the Wonkgongaru tribe desires to make fish plentiful, he paints himself all over with red ochre, and, taking little pointed bones, goes into a pool. There he pierces his scrotum and the skin around the navel with the bones, and sits down in the water. The blood from the wounds, as it mingles with the water, is supposed to give rise to fish. In all these cases clearly a fertilising virtue is ascribed to human blood. The ascription is interesting and may possibly go some way to explain the widely-spread custom of voluntary wounds and mutilations in religious or magical rites. It may therefore be worth while, even at the cost of a digression, to enquire a little more closely into the custom as it is practised by the rude savages of Australia.
In the first place, then, the Dieri custom of pouring blood over the supposed remains of the ancestor in his sandhill closely resembles the custom observed by some of the Australian aborigines at the graves of their relatives. Thus among the tribes on the River Darling several men used to stand by the open grave and cut each other's heads with a boomerang, and then hold their bleeding heads over the grave so that the blood dripped on the corpse at the bottom of it. If the deceased was highly esteemed, the bleeding was repeated after some earth had been thrown on the corpse. Among the Arunta it is customary for the women kinsfolk to cut themselves at the grave so that blood flows upon it. Again, at the Vasse River, in Western Australia, before the body was lowered into the grave, the natives used to gash their thighs, and at the flowing of the blood they all said, "I have brought blood," and they stamped the foot forcibly on the ground, sprinkling the blood around them; then wiping the wounds with a wisp of leaves, they threw it, all bloody, on the dead man. After that they let the body down into the grave. Further, it is a common practice with the Central Australians to give human blood to the sick and aged for the purpose of strengthening them; and in order that the blood may have this effect it need not always be drunk by the infirm person, it is enough to sprinkle it on his body. For example, a young man will often open a vein in his arm and let the blood trickle over the body of an older man in order to strengthen his aged friend; and sometimes the old man will drink a little of the blood. So in illness the blood is sometimes applied outwardly as well as inwardly, the patient both drinking it and having it rubbed over his body; sometimes apparently he only drinks it. The blood is drawn from a man or woman who is related to the sufferer either by blood or marriage, and the notion always is to convey to the sick person some of the strength of the blood-giver. In the Wiimbaio tribe, if a man had nearly killed his wife in a paroxysm of rage, the woman was laid out on the ground, and the husband's arms being tightly bound above the elbows, the medicine-man opened the veins in them and allowed the blood to flow on the prostrate body of the victim till the man grew faint. The intention of thus bleeding the man over the woman was apparently to restore her to life by means of the blood drawn from her assailant. Again, before an avenging party starts to take the life of a distant enemy, all the men stand up, open veins in their genital organs with sharp flints or pointed sticks, and allow the blood to spurtle over each other's thighs. This ceremony is supposed to strengthen the men mutually, and also to knit them so closely together that treachery henceforth becomes impossible. Sometimes for the same purpose blood is drawn from the arm and drunk by the men of the avenging party, and if one of them refuses thus to pledge himself the others will force his mouth open and pour the blood into it. After that, even if he wishes to play the traitor and to give the doomed man warning, he cannot do so; he is bound by a physical necessity to side with the avengers whose blood he has swallowed.
Further, it is worth while to notice some uses made of human blood in connexion with the ceremonies of circumcision and subincision, which all lads of the Central Australian tribes have to undergo before they are recognised as full-grown men. For example, the blood drawn from them at these operations is caught in a hollow shield and taken to certain kinsmen or kinswomen, who drink it or have it smeared on their breasts and foreheads. The motive of this practice is not mentioned, but on the analogy of the preceding customs we may conjecture that it is to strengthen the relatives who partake of the blood. This interpretation is confirmed by an analogous use in Queensland of the blood drawn from a woman at the operation which in the female sex corresponds to subincision in the male; for that blood, mixed with another ingredient, is kept and drunk as a medicine by any sick person who may be in the camp at the time. Moreover, it is corroborated by a similar use of the foreskin which has been removed at circumcision; for among the southern Arunta this piece of skin is given to the younger brother of the circumcised lad and he swallows it, in the belief that it will make him grow strong and tall. In the tribe at Fowler's Bay, who practise both circumcision and subincision, the severed foreskin is swallowed by the operator, perhaps in order to strengthen the lad sympathetically. In some tribes of North-West Australia it is the lad himself who swallows his own foreskin mixed with kangaroo flesh; while in other tribes of the same region the severed portion is taken by the relations and deposited under the bark of a large tree. The possible significance of this latter treatment of the foreskin will appear presently. Among the Kolkodoons of Cloniny, in Northern Queensland, the foreskin is strung on twine made of human hair, and is then tied round the mother's neck "to keep off the devil." In the Warramunga tribe the old men draw blood from their own subincised urethras in presence of the lads who a few days before have undergone the operation of subincision. The object of this custom, we are told, is to promote the healing of the young men's wounds and to strengthen them generally. It does not appear that the blood of the old men is drunk by or smeared upon the youths; seemingly it is supposed to benefit them sympathetically without direct contact. A similar action of blood at a distance may partly explain a very singular custom observed by the Arunta women at the moment when a lad is being subincised. The operation is performed at a distance from, but within hearing of, the women's camp. When the boy is seized in order to be operated on, the men of the party raise a loud shout of "Pirr-rr." At that sound the women immediately assemble in their camp, and the boy's mother cuts gashes across the stomach and shoulders of the boy's sisters, her own elder sisters, an old woman who furnished the boy with a sacred fire at circumcision, and all the women whose daughters he would be allowed to marry; and while she cuts she imitates the sound made by the men who are subincising her son. These cuts generally leave behind them a definite series of scars; they have a name of their own , and are often represented by definite lines on the bull-roarers. What the exact meaning of this extraordinary ceremony may be, I cannot say; but perhaps one of its supposed effects may be to relieve the boy's pain by transferring it to his women-kind. In like manner, when the Warramunga men are fighting each other with blazing torches, the women burn themselves with lighted twigs in the belief that by so doing they prevent the men from inflicting serious injuries on each other. The theory further receives some support from certain practices formerly observed by the natives inhabiting the coast of New South Wales. Before lads had their noses bored, the medicine men threw themselves into contortions on the ground, and after pretending to suffer great pain were delivered of bones, which were to be used at the ceremony of nose-boring. The lads were told that the more the medicine men suffered, the less pain they themselves would feel. Again, among the same natives, when a woman was in labour, a female friend would tie one end of a cord round the sufferer's neck and rub her own gums with the other end till they bled, probably in order to draw away the pain from the mother to herself. For a similar reason, perhaps, in Samoa, while blood was being drawn from a virgin bride, her friends, young and old, beat their heads with stones till they bled.
Now too we can fully understand the meaning of the bloody ritual in the ceremonies for the multiplication of the totem animals and plants. We have seen that a strengthening and fertilising virtue is attributed to human blood. What more natural than that it should be poured out by the men of the totem on the spot in which the disembodied spirits of the totem animals or plants are waiting for reincarnation? Clearly the rite seems intended to enable these spirits to take bodily shape and be born again, in order that they may again serve as food, if not to the men of the totem clan, at least to all the other numbers of the tribe. Later on we shall find that the attempt to reincarnate the souls of dead animals, in order that their bodies may be eaten over again, is not peculiar to the Australian savages, but is practised with many curious rites by peoples in other parts of the world.
Our examination of the magical rites performed by the Australians for the maintenance of the food supply has led us into this digression. It is time to pass to ceremonies practised for the same purpose and on the same principles by peoples in other parts of the world.
The Indians of British Columbia live largely upon the fish which abound in their seas and rivers. If the fish do not come in due season, and the Indians are hungry, a Nootka wizard will make an image of a swimming fish and put it into the water in the direction from which the fish generally appear. This ceremony, accompanied by a prayer to the fish to come, will cause them to arrive at once. The islanders of Torres Straits use models of dugong and turtles to charm dugong and turtle to their destruction. The Toradjas of Central Celebes believe that things of the same sort attract each other by means of their indwelling spirits or vital ether. Hence they hang up the jawbones of deer and wild pigs in their houses, in order that the spirits which animate these bones may draw the living creatures of the same kind into the path of the hunter. In the island of Nias, when a wild pig has fallen into the pit prepared for it, the animal is taken out and its back is rubbed with nine fallen leaves, in the belief that this will make nine more wild pigs fall into the pit, just as the nine leaves fell from the tree. In the East Indian islands of Saparoea, Haroekoe, and Noessa Laut, when a fisherman is about to set a trap for fish in the sea, he looks out for a tree, of which the fruit has been much pecked at by birds. From such a tree he cuts a stout branch and makes of it the principal post in his fish-trap; for he believes that just as the tree lured many birds to its fruit, so the branch cut from that tree will lure many fish to the trap.
The western tribes of British New Guinea employ a charm to aid the hunter in spearing dugong or turtle. A small beetle, which haunts coco-nut trees, is placed in the hole of the spear-haft into which the spear-head fits. This is supposed to make the spear-head stick fast in the dugong or turtle, just as the beetle sticks fast to a man's skin when it bites him. When a Cambodian hunter has set his nets and taken nothing, he strips himself naked, goes some way off, then strolls up to the net as if he did not see it, lets himself be caught in it, and cries, "Hillo! what's this? I'm afraid I'm caught." After that the net is sure to catch game. A pantomime of the same sort has been acted within living memory in our Scottish Highlands. The Rev. James Macdonald, now of Reay in Caithness, tells us that in his boyhood when he was fishing with companions about Loch Aline and they had had no bites for a long time, they used to make a pretence of throwing one of their fellows overboard and hauling him out of the water, as if he were a fish; after that the trout or silloch would begin to nibble, according as the boat was on fresh or salt water. Before a Carrier Indian goes out to snare martens, he sleeps by himself for about ten nights beside the fire with a little stick pressed down on his neck. This naturally causes the fall-stick of his trap to drop down on the neck of the marten. Among the Galelareese, who inhabit a district in the northern part of Halmahera, a large island to the west of New Guinea, it is a maxim that when you are loading your gun to go out shooting, you should always put the bullet in your mouth before you insert it in the gun; for by so doing you practically eat the game that is to be hit by the bullet, which therefore cannot possibly miss the mark. A Malay who has baited a trap for crocodiles, and is awaiting results, is careful in eating his curry always to begin by swallowing three lumps of rice successively; for this helps the bait to slide more easily down the crocodile's throat. He is equally scrupulous not to take any bones out of his curry; for, if he did, it seems clear that the sharp-pointed stick on which the bait is skewered would similarly work itself loose, and the crocodile would get off with the bait. Hence in these circumstances it is prudent for the hunter, before he begins his meal, to get somebody else to take the bones out of his curry, otherwise he may at any moment have to choose between swallowing a bone and losing the crocodile.
This last rule is an instance of the things which the hunter abstains from doing lest, on the principle that like produces like, they should spoil his luck. For it is to be observed that the system of sympathetic magic is not merely composed of positive precepts; it comprises a very large number of negative precepts, that is, prohibitions. It tells you not merely what to do, but also what to leave undone. The positive precepts are charms: the negative precepts are taboos. In fact the whole doctrine of taboo, or at all events a large part of it, would seem to be only a special application of sympathetic magic, with its two great laws of similarity and contact. Though these laws are certainly not formulated in so many words nor even conceived in the abstract by the savage, they are nevertheless implicitly believed by him to regulate the course of nature quite independently of human will. He thinks that if he acts in a certain way, certain consequences will inevitably follow in virtue of one or other of these laws; and if the consequences of a particular act appear to him likely to prove disagreeable or dangerous, he is naturally careful not to act in that way lest he should incur them. In other words, he abstains from doing that which, in accordance with his mistaken notions of cause and effect, he falsely believes would injure him; in short, he subjects himself to a taboo. Thus taboo is so far a negative application of practical magic. Positive magic or sorcery says, "Do this in order that so and so may happen." Negative magic or taboo says, "Do not do this, lest so and so should happen." The aim of positive magic or sorcery is to produce a desired event; the aim of negative magic or taboo is to avoid an undesirable one. But both consequences, the desirable and the undesirable, are supposed to be brought about in accordance with the laws of similarity and contact. And just as the desired consequence is not really effected by the observance of a magical ceremony, so the dreaded consequence does not really result from the violation of a taboo. If the supposed evil necessarily followed a breach of taboo, the taboo would not be a taboo but a precept of morality or common sense. It is not a taboo to say, "Do not put your hand in the fire"; it is a rule of common sense, because the forbidden action entails a real, not an imaginary evil. In short, those negative precepts which we call taboo are just as vain and futile as those positive precepts which we call sorcery. The two things are merely opposite sides or poles of one great disastrous fallacy, a mistaken conception of the association of ideas. Of that fallacy, sorcery is the positive, and taboo the negative pole. If we give the general name of magic to the whole erroneous system, both theoretical and practical, then taboo may be defined as the negative side of practical magic. To put this in tabular form:--
Magic Theoretical Practical Positive Magic or Sorcery Negative Magic or Taboo
I have made these remarks on taboo and its relations to magic because I am about to give some instances of taboos observed by hunters, fishermen, and others, and I wished to shew that they fall under the head of Sympathetic Magic, being only particular applications of that general theory. Thus, it is a rule with the Galelareese that when you have caught fish and strung them on a line, you may not cut the line through, or next time you go a-fishing your fishing-line will be sure to break. Among the Esquimaux of Baffin Land boys are forbidden to play cat's cradle, because if they did so their fingers might in later life become entangled in the harpoon-line. Here the taboo is obviously an application of the law of similarity, which is the basis of homoeopathic magic: as the child's fingers are entangled by the string in playing cat's cradle, so they will be entangled by the harpoon-line when he is a man and hunts whales. Again, among the Huzuls, who inhabit the wooded north-eastern slopes of the Carpathian Mountains, the wife of a hunter may not spin while her husband is eating, or the game will turn and wind like the spindle, and the hunter will be unable to hit it. Here again the taboo is clearly derived from the law of similarity. So, too, in most parts of ancient Italy women were forbidden by law to spin on the highroads as they walked, or even to carry their spindles openly, because any such action was believed to injure the crops. Probably the notion was that the twirling of the spindle would twirl the corn-stalks and prevent them from growing straight. So, too, among the Ainos of Saghalien a pregnant woman may not spin nor twist ropes for two months before her delivery, because they think that if she did so the child's guts might be entangled like the thread. For a like reason in Bilaspore, a district of India, when the chief men of a village meet in council, no one present should twirl a spindle; for they think that if such a thing were to happen, the discussion, like the spindle, would move in a circle and never be wound up. In the East Indian islands of Saparoea, Haroekoe, and Noessa Laut, any one who comes to the house of a hunter must walk straight in; he may not loiter at the door, for were he to do so, the game would in like manner stop in front of the hunter's snares and then turn back, instead of being caught in the trap. For a similar reason it is a rule with the Toradjas of Central Celebes that no one may stand or loiter on the ladder of a house where there is a pregnant woman, for such delay would retard the birth of the child; and in various parts of Sumatra the woman herself in these circumstances is forbidden to stand at the door or on the top rung of the house-ladder under pain of suffering hard labour for her imprudence in neglecting so elementary a precaution. Malays engaged in the search for camphor eat their food dry and take care not to pound their salt fine. The reason is that the camphor occurs in the form of small grains deposited in the cracks of the trunk of the camphor-tree. Accordingly it seems plain to the Malay that if, while seeking for camphor, he were to eat his salt finely ground, the camphor would be found also in fine grains; whereas by eating his salt coarse he ensures that the grains of the camphor will also be large. Camphor hunters in Borneo use the leathery sheath of the leaf-stalk of the Penang palm as a plate for food, and during the whole of the expedition they will never wash the plate, for fear that the camphor might dissolve and disappear from the crevices of the tree. Apparently they think that to wash their plates would be to wash out the camphor crystals from the trees in which they are imbedded. In Laos, a province of Siam, a rhinoceros hunter will not wash himself for fear that as a consequence the wounds inflicted on the rhinoceros might not be mortal, and that the animal might disappear in one of the caves full of water in the mountains. The chief product of some parts of Laos is lac. This is a resinous gum exuded by a red insect on the young branches of trees, to which the little creatures have to be attached by hand. All who engage in the business of gathering the gum abstain from washing themselves and especially from cleansing their heads, lest by removing the parasites from their hair they should detach the other insects from the boughs. Some of the Brazilian Indians would never bring a slaughtered deer into their hut without first hamstringing it, believing that if they failed to do so, they and their children would never be able to run down their enemies. Apparently they thought that by hamstringing the animal they at the same stroke deprived their foemen of the use of their legs. No Arikara Indian would break a marrow bone in a hut; for they think that were he to do so their horses would break their legs in the prairie. Again, a Blackfoot Indian who has set a trap for eagles, and is watching it, would not eat rosebuds on any account; for he argues that if he did so, and an eagle alighted near the trap, the rosebuds in his own stomach would make the bird itch, with the result that instead of swallowing the bait the eagle would merely sit and scratch himself. Following this train of thought the eagle hunter also refrains from using an awl when he is looking after his snares; for surely if he were to scratch with an awl, the eagles would scratch him. The same disastrous consequence would follow if his wives and children at home used an awl while he is out after eagles, and accordingly they are forbidden to handle the tool in his absence for fear of putting him in bodily danger.
All the foregoing taboos being based on the law of similarity may be called homoeopathic taboos. The Cholones, an Indian tribe of eastern Peru, make use of poisoned arrows in the chase, but there are some animals, such as armadillos, certain kinds of falcons, and a species of vulture, which they would on no account shoot at with these weapons. For they believe that between the poisoned arrows which they use and the supply of poison at home there exists a sympathetic relation of such a sort that if they shot at any of these creatures with poisoned shafts, all the poison at home would be spoilt, which would be a great loss to them. Here the exact train of thought is not clear; but we may suppose that the animals in question are believed to possess a power of counteracting and annulling the effect of the poison, and that consequently if they are touched by it, all the poison, including the store of it at home, would be robbed of its virtue. However that may be, it is plain that the superstition rests on the law of contact, on the notion, namely, that things which have once been in contact remain sympathetically in contact with each other always. The poison with which the hunter wounds an animal has once been in contact with the store of poison at home; hence if the poison in the wound loses its venom, so necessarily will all the poison at home. These may be called contagious taboos.
The reader may have observed that in some of the foregoing examples of taboos the magical influence is supposed to operate at considerable distances; thus among the Blackfeet Indians the wives and children of an eagle hunter are forbidden to use an awl during his absence, lest the eagles should scratch the distant husband and father; and again no male animal may be killed in the house of a Malagasy soldier while he is away at the wars, lest the killing of the animal should entail the killing of the man. This belief in the sympathetic influence exerted on each other by persons or things at a distance is of the essence of magic. Whatever doubts science may entertain as to the possibility of action at a distance, magic has none; faith in telepathy is one of its first principles. A modern advocate of the influence of mind upon mind at a distance would have no difficulty in convincing a savage; the savage believed in it long ago, and what is more, he acted on his belief with a logical consistency such as his civilised brother in the faith has not yet, so far as I am aware, exhibited in his conduct. For the savage is convinced not only that magical ceremonies affect persons and things afar off, but that the simplest acts of daily life may do so too. Hence on important occasions the behaviour of friends and relations at a distance is often regulated by a more or less elaborate code of rules, the neglect of which by the one set of persons would, it is supposed, entail misfortune or even death on the absent ones. In particular when a party of men are out hunting or fighting, their kinsfolk at home are often expected to do certain things or to abstain from doing certain others, for the sake of ensuring the safety and success of the distant hunters or warriors. I will now give some instances of this magical telepathy both in its positive and in its negative aspect.
In Laos when an elephant hunter is starting for the chase, he warns his wife not to cut her hair or oil her body in his absence; for if she cut her hair the elephant would burst the toils, if she oiled herself it would slip through them. When a Dyak village has turned out to hunt wild pigs in the jungle, the people who stay at home may not touch oil or water with their hands during the absence of their friends; for if they did so, the hunters would all be "butter-fingered" and the prey would slip through their hands. In setting out to look for the rare and precious eagle-wood on the mountains, Cham peasants enjoin their wives, whom they leave at home, not to scold or quarrel in their absence, for such domestic brawls would lead to their husbands being rent in pieces by bears and tigers. A Hottentot woman whose husband is out hunting must do one of two things all the time he is away. Either she must light a fire and keep it burning till he comes back; or if she does not choose to do that, she must go to the water and continue to splash it about on the ground. When she is tired with throwing the water about, her place may be taken by her servant, but the exercise must in any case be kept up without cessation. To cease splashing the water or to let the fire out would be equally fatal to the husband's prospect of a successful bag. In Yule Island, Torres Straits, when the men are gone to fetch sago, a fire is lit and carefully kept burning the whole time of their absence; for the people believe that if it went out the voyagers would fare ill. At the other end of the world the Lapps similarly object to extinguish a brand in water while any members of the family are out fishing, since to do so would spoil their luck.
Among the Koniags of Alaska a traveller once observed a young woman lying wrapt in a bearskin in the corner of a hut. On asking whether she were ill, he learned that her husband was out whale-fishing, and that until his return she had to lie fasting in order to ensure a good catch. Among the Esquimaux of Alaska similar notions prevail. The women during the whaling season remain in comparative idleness, as it is considered not good for them to sew while the men are out in the boats. If during this period any garments should need to be repaired, the women must take them far back out of sight of the sea and mend them there in little tents in which just one person can sit. And while the crews are at sea no work should be done at home which would necessitate pounding or hewing or any kind of noise; and in the huts of men who are away in the boats no work of any kind whatever should be carried on. When the Esquimaux of Aivilik and Iglulik are away hunting on the ice, the bedding may not be raised up, because they think that to do so would cause the ice to crack and drift off, and so the men might be lost. And among these people in the winter, when the new moon appears, boys must run out of the snow-house, take a handful of snow, and put it into the kettle. It is believed that this helps the hunter to capture the seal and to bring it home. When the Maidu Indians of California were engaged in driving deer into the snares which they had prepared for them, and which consisted of fences stretched from tree to tree, the women and children who were left behind in the village had to observe a variety of regulations. The women had to keep quiet and spend much of the time indoors, and children might not romp, shout, jump over things, kick, run, fall down, or throw stones. If these rules were broken, it was believed that the deer would become unmanageable and would jump the fence, so that the whole drive would be unsuccessful.
While a Gilyak hunter is pursuing the game in the forest, his children at home are forbidden to make drawings on wood or on sand; for they fear that if the children did so, the paths in the forest would become as perplexed as the lines in the drawings, so that the hunter might lose his way and never return. A Russian political prisoner once taught some Gilyak children to read and write; but their parents forbade them to write when any of their fathers was away from home; for it seemed to them that writing was a peculiarly complicated form of drawing, and they stood aghast at the idea of the danger to which such a drawing would expose the hunters out in the wild woods. Among the Jukagirs of north-eastern Siberia, when a young man is out hunting, his unmarried sister at home may not look at his footprints nor eat certain parts of the game killed by him. If she leaves the house while he is absent at the chase, she must keep her eyes fixed on the ground, and may not speak of the chase nor ask any questions about it. When a Nuba of north-eastern Africa goes to El Obeid for the first time, he tells his wife not to wash or oil herself and not to wear pearls round her neck during his absence, because by doing so she would draw down on him the most terrible misfortunes. When Bushmen are out hunting, any bad shots they may make are set down to such causes as that the children at home are playing on the men's beds or the like, and the wives who allow such things to happen are blamed for their husbands' indifferent marksmanship.
Elephant-hunters in East Africa believe that, if their wives prove unfaithful in their absence, this gives the elephant power over his pursuer, who will accordingly be killed or severely wounded. Hence if a hunter hears of his wife's misconduct, he abandons the chase and returns home. If a Wagogo hunter is unsuccessful, or is attacked by a lion, he attributes it to his wife's misbehaviour at home, and returns to her in great wrath. While he is away hunting, she may not let any one pass behind her or stand in front of her as she sits; and she must lie on her face in bed. The Moxos Indians of eastern Bolivia thought that if a hunter's wife was unfaithful to him in his absence he would be bitten by a serpent or a jaguar. Accordingly, if such an accident happened to him, it was sure to entail the punishment, and often the death, of the woman, whether she was innocent or guilty. An Aleutian hunter of sea-otters thinks that he cannot kill a single animal if during his absence from home his wife should be unfaithful or his sister unchaste.
The Huichol Indians of Mexico treat as a demi-god a species of cactus which throws the eater into a state of ecstasy. The plant does not grow in their country, and has to be fetched every year by men who make a journey of forty-three days for the purpose. Meanwhile the wives at home contribute to the safety of their absent husbands by never walking fast, much less running, while the men are on the road. They also do their best to ensure the benefits which, in the shape of rain, good crops, and so forth, are expected to flow from the sacred mission. With this intention they subject themselves to severe restrictions like those imposed upon their husbands. During the whole of the time which elapses till the festival of the cactus is held, neither party washes except on certain occasions, and then only with water brought from the distant country where the holy plant grows. They also fast much, eat no salt, and are bound to strict continence. Any one who breaks this law is punished with illness, and, moreover, jeopardises the result which all are striving for. Health, luck, and life are to be gained by gathering the cactus, the gourd of the God of Fire; but inasmuch as the pure fire cannot benefit the impure, men and women must not only remain chaste for the time being, but must also purge themselves from the taint of past sin. Hence four days after the men have started the women gather and confess to Grandfather Fire with what men they have been in love from childhood till now. They may not omit a single one, for if they did so the men would not find a single cactus. So to refresh their memories each one prepares a string with as many knots as she has had lovers. This she brings to the temple, and, standing before the fire, she mentions aloud all the men she has scored on her string, name after name. Having ended her confession, she throws the string into the fire, and when the god has consumed it in his pure flame, her sins are forgiven her and she departs in peace. From now on the women are averse even to letting men pass near them. The cactus-seekers themselves make in like manner a clean breast of all their frailties. For every peccadillo they tie a knot on a string, and after they have "talked to all the five winds" they deliver the rosary of their sins to the leader, who burns it in the fire.
Many of the indigenous tribes of Sarawak are firmly persuaded that were the wives to commit adultery while their husbands are searching for camphor in the jungle, the camphor obtained by the men would evaporate. Husbands can discover, by certain knots in the tree, when their wives are unfaithful; and it is said that in former days many women were killed by jealous husbands on no better evidence than that of these knots. Further, the wives dare not touch a comb while their husbands are away collecting the camphor; for if they did so, the interstices between the fibres of the tree, instead of being filled with the precious crystals, would be empty like the spaces between the teeth of a comb. While men of the Toaripi or Motumotu tribe of eastern New Guinea are away hunting, fishing, fighting, or on any long journey, the people who remain at home must observe strict chastity, and may not let the fire go out. Those of them who stay in the men's club-houses must further abstain from eating certain foods and from touching anything that belongs to others. A breach of these rules might, it is believed, entail the failure of the expedition. Among the tribes of Geelvink Bay, in north-western New Guinea, when the men are gone on a long journey, as to Ceram or Tidore, the wives and sisters left at home sing to the moon, accompanying the lay with the booming music of gongs. The singing takes place in the afternoons, beginning two or three days before the new moon, and lasting for the same time after it. If the silver sickle of the moon is seen in the sky, they raise a loud cry of joy. Asked why they do so, they answer, "Now we see the moon, and so do our husbands, and now we know that they are well; if we did not sing, they would be sick or some other misfortune would befall them." On nights when the moon is at the full the natives of Doreh, in north-western New Guinea, go out fishing on the lagoons. Their mode of proceeding is to poison the water with the pounded roots of a certain plant which has a powerful narcotic effect; the fish are stunned by it, and so easily caught. While the men are at work on the moonlit water, the people on the shore must keep as still as death with their eyes fixed on the fishermen; but no woman with child may be among them, for if she were there and looked at the water, the poison would at once lose its effect and the fish would escape. In the Kei Islands, to the south-west of New Guinea, as soon as a vessel that is about to sail for a distant port has been launched, the part of the beach on which it lay is covered as speedily as possible with palm branches, and becomes sacred. No one may thenceforth cross that spot till the ship comes home. To cross it sooner would cause the vessel to perish. Moreover, all the time that the voyage lasts three or four young girls, specially chosen for the duty, are supposed to remain in sympathetic connexion with the mariners and to contribute by their behaviour to the safety and success of the voyage. On no account, except for the most necessary purpose, may they quit the room that has been assigned to them. More than that, so long as the vessel is believed to be at sea they must remain absolutely motionless, crouched on their mats with their hands clasped between their knees. They may not turn their heads to the left or to the right or make any other movement whatsoever. If they did, it would cause the boat to pitch and toss; and they may not eat any sticky stuff, such as rice boiled in coco-nut milk, for the stickiness of the food would clog the passage of the boat through the water. When the sailors are supposed to have reached their destination, the strictness of these rules is somewhat relaxed; but during the whole time that the voyage lasts the girls are forbidden to eat fish which have sharp bones or stings, such as the sting-ray, lest their friends at sea should be involved in sharp, stinging trouble.
Where beliefs like these prevail as to the sympathetic connexion between friends at a distance, we need not wonder that above everything else war, with its stern yet stirring appeal to some of the deepest and tenderest of human emotions, should quicken in the anxious relations left behind a desire to turn the sympathetic bond to the utmost account for the benefit of the dear ones who may at any moment be fighting and dying far away. Hence, to secure an end so natural and laudable, friends at home are apt to resort to devices which will strike us as pathetic or ludicrous, according as we consider their object or the means adopted to effect it. Thus in some districts of Borneo, when a Dyak is out head-hunting, his wife or, if he is unmarried, his sister must wear a sword day and night in order that he may always be thinking of his weapons; and she may not sleep during the day nor go to bed before two in the morning, lest her husband or brother should thereby be surprised in his sleep by an enemy. In other parts of Borneo, when the men are away on a warlike expedition, their mats are spread in their houses just as if they were at home, and the fires are kept up till late in the evening and lighted again before dawn, in order that the men may not be cold. Further, the roofing of the house is opened before daylight to prevent the distant husbands, brothers, and sons from sleeping too late, and so being surprised by the enemy. While a Malay of the Peninsula is away at the wars, his pillows and sleeping-mat at home must be kept rolled up. If any one else were to use them, the absent warrior's courage would fail and disaster would befall him. His wife and children may not have their hair cut in his absence, nor may he himself have his hair shorn.
Among the Sea Dyaks of Banting in Sarawak the women strictly observe an elaborate code of rules while the men are away fighting. Some of the rules are negative and some are positive, but all alike are based on the principles of magical homoeopathy and telepathy. Amongst them are the following. The women must wake very early in the morning and open the windows as soon as it is light; otherwise their absent husbands will oversleep themselves. The women may not oil their hair, or the men will slip. The women may neither sleep nor doze by day, or the men will be drowsy on the march. The women must cook and scatter popcorn on the verandah every morning; so will the men be agile in their movements. The rooms must be kept very tidy, all boxes being placed near the walls; for if any one were to stumble over them, the absent husbands would fall and be at the mercy of the foe. At every meal a little rice must be left in the pot and put aside; so will the men far away always have something to eat and need never go hungry. On no account may the women sit at the loom till their legs grow cramped, otherwise their husbands will likewise be stiff in their joints and unable to rise up quickly or to run away from the foe. So in order to keep their husband's joints supple the women often vary their labours at the loom by walking up and down the verandah. Further, they may not cover up their faces, or the men would not be able to find their way through the tall grass or jungle. Again, the women may not sew with a needle, or the men will tread on the sharp spikes set by the enemy in the path. Should a wife prove unfaithful while her husband is away, he will lose his life in the enemy's country. Some years ago all these rules and more were observed by the women of Banting, while their husbands were fighting for the English against rebels. But alas! these tender precautions availed them little; for many a man, whose faithful wife was keeping watch and ward for him at home, found a soldier's grave.
When Galelareese men are going away to war, they are accompanied down to the boats by the women. But after the leave-taking is over, the women, in returning to their houses, must be careful not to stumble or fall, and in the house they may neither be angry nor lift up weapons against each other; otherwise the men will fall and be killed in battle. Similarly, we saw that among the Chams domestic brawls at home are supposed to cause the searcher for eagle-wood to fall a prey to wild beasts on the mountains. Further, Galelareese women may not lay down the chopping knives in the house while their husbands are at the wars; the knives must always be hung up on hooks. The reason for the rule is not given; we may conjecture that it is a fear lest, if the chopping knives were laid down by the women at home, the men would be apt to lay down their weapons in the battle or at other inopportune moments. In the Kei Islands, when the warriors have departed, the women return indoors and bring out certain baskets containing fruits and stones. These fruits and stones they anoint and place on a board, murmuring as they do so, "O lord sun, moon, let the bullets rebound from our husbands, brothers, betrothed, and other relations, just as raindrops rebound from these objects which are smeared with oil." As soon as the first shot is heard, the baskets are put aside, and the women, seizing their fans, rush out of the houses. Then, waving their fans in the direction of the enemy, they run through the village, while they sing, "O golden fans! let our bullets hit, and those of the enemy miss." In this custom the ceremony of anointing stones, in order that the bullets may recoil from the men like raindrops from the stones, is a piece of pure homoeopathic or imitative magic; but the prayer to the sun, that he will be pleased to give effect to the charm, is a religious and perhaps later addition. The waving of the fans seems to be a charm to direct the bullets towards or away from their mark, according as they are discharged from the guns of friends or foes.
Among the Tshi-speaking peoples of the Gold Coast the wives of men who are away with the army paint themselves white, and adorn their persons with beads and charms. On the day when a battle is expected to take place, they run about armed with guns, or sticks carved to look like guns, and taking green paw-paws , they hack them with knives, as if they were chopping off the heads of the foe. The pantomime is no doubt merely an imitative charm, to enable the men to do to the enemy as the women do to the paw-paws. In the West African town of Framin, while the Ashantee war was raging some years ago, Mr. Fitzgerald Marriott saw a dance performed by women whose husbands had gone as carriers to the war. They were painted white and wore nothing but a short petticoat. At their head was a shrivelled old sorceress in a very short white petticoat, her black hair arranged in a sort of long projecting horn, and her black face, breasts, arms, and legs profusely adorned with white circles and crescents. All carried long white brushes made of buffalo or horse tails, and as they danced they sang, "Our husbands have gone to Ashanteeland; may they sweep their enemies off the face of the earth!" Among the Thompson Indians of British Columbia, when the men were on the war-path, the women performed dances at frequent intervals. These dances were believed to ensure the success of the expedition. The dancers flourished their knives, threw long sharp-pointed sticks forward, or drew sticks with hooked ends repeatedly backward and forward. Throwing the sticks forward was symbolic of piercing or warding off the enemy, and drawing them back was symbolic of drawing their own men from danger. The hook at the end of the stick was particularly well adapted to serve the purpose of a life-saving apparatus. The women always pointed their weapons towards the enemy's country. They painted their faces red and sang as they danced, and they prayed to the weapons to preserve their husbands and help them to kill many foes. Some had eagle-down stuck on the points of their sticks. When the dance was over, these weapons were hidden. If a woman whose husband was at the war thought she saw hair or a piece of a scalp on the weapon when she took it out, she knew that her husband had killed an enemy. But if she saw a stain of blood on it, she knew he was wounded or dead. When the men of the Yuki tribe of Indians in California were away fighting, the women at home did not sleep; they danced continually in a circle, chanting and waving leafy wands. For they said that if they danced all the time, their husbands would not grow tired. Among the Haida Indians of the Queen Charlotte Islands, when the men had gone to war, the women at home would get up very early in the morning and pretend to make war by falling upon their children and feigning to take them for slaves. This was supposed to help their husbands to go and do likewise. If a wife were unfaithful to her husband while he was away on the war-path, he would probably be killed. For ten nights all the women at home lay with their heads towards the point of the compass to which the war-canoes had paddled away. Then they changed about, for the warriors were supposed to be coming home across the sea. At Masset the Haida women danced and sang war-songs all the time their husbands were away at the wars, and they had to keep everything about them in a certain order. It was thought that a wife might kill her husband by not observing these customs. In the Kafir district of the Hindoo Koosh, while the men are out raiding, the women abandon their work in the fields and assemble in the villages to dance day and night. The dances are kept up most of each day and the whole of each night. Sir George Robertson, who reports the custom, more than once watched the dancers dancing at midnight and in the early morning, and could see by the fitful glow of the woodfire how haggard and tired they looked, yet how gravely and earnestly they persisted in what they regarded as a serious duty. The dances of these Kafirs are said to be performed in honour of certain of the national gods, but when we consider the custom in connexion with the others which have just been passed in review, we may reasonably surmise that it is or was originally in its essence a sympathetic charm intended to keep the absent warriors wakeful, lest they should be surprised in their sleep by the enemy. When a band of Carib Indians of the Orinoco had gone on the war-path, their friends left in the village used to calculate as nearly as they could the exact moment when the absent warriors would be advancing to attack the enemy. Then they took two lads, laid them down on a bench, and inflicted a most severe scourging on their bare backs. This the youths submitted to without a murmur, supported in their sufferings by the firm conviction, in which they had been bred from childhood, that on the constancy and fortitude with which they bore the cruel ordeal depended the valour and success of their comrades in the battle.
Among the many beneficent uses to which a mistaken ingenuity has applied the principle of homoeopathic or imitative magic, is that of causing trees and plants to bear fruit in due season. In Th?ringen the man who sows flax carries the seed in a long bag which reaches from his shoulders to his knees, and he walks with long strides, so that the bag sways to and fro on his back. It is believed that this will cause the flax to wave in the wind. In the interior of Sumatra rice is sown by women who, in sowing, let their hair hang loose down their back, in order that the rice may grow luxuriantly and have long stalks. Similarly, in ancient Mexico a festival was held in honour of the goddess of maize, or "the long-haired mother," as she was called. It began at the time "when the plant had attained its full growth, and fibres shooting forth from the top of the green ear indicated that the grain was fully formed. During this festival the women wore their long hair unbound, shaking and tossing it in the dances which were the chief feature in the ceremonial, in order that the tassel of the maize might grow in like profusion, that the grain might be correspondingly large and flat, and that the people might have abundance." It is a Malay maxim to plant maize when your stomach is full, and to see to it that your dibble is thick; for this will swell the ear of the maize. And they say that you should sow rice also with a full stomach, for then the ears will be full. The eminent novelist, Mr. Thomas Hardy, was once told that the reason why certain trees in front of his house, near Weymouth, did not thrive, was that he looked at them before breakfast on an empty stomach. More elaborate still are the measures taken by an Esthonian peasant woman to make her cabbages thrive. On the day when they are sown she bakes great pancakes, in order that the cabbages may have great broad leaves; and she wears a dazzling white hood in the belief that this will cause the cabbages to have fine white heads. Moreover, as soon as the cabbages are transplanted, a small round stone is wrapt up tightly in a white linen rag and set at the end of the cabbage bed, because in this way the cabbage heads will grow very white and firm. Among the Huzuls of the Carpathians, when a woman is planting cabbages, she winds many cloths about her head, in order that the heads of the cabbages may also be thick. And as soon as she has sown parsley, she grasps the calf of her leg with both hands, saying, "May it be as thick as that!" Among the Kurs of East Prussia, who inhabit the long sandy tongue of land known as the Nehrung which parts the Baltic from a lagoon, when a farmer sows his fields in spring, he carries an axe and chops the earth with it, in order that the cornstalks may be so sturdy that an axe will be needed to hew them down. For much the same reason a Bavarian sower in sowing wheat will sometimes wear a golden ring, in order that the corn may have a fine yellow colour. The Malagasy think that only people with a good even set of teeth should plant maize, for otherwise there will be empty spaces in the maize cob corresponding to the empty spaces in the planter's teeth.
In many parts of Europe dancing or leaping high in the air are approved homoeopathic modes of making the crops grow high. Thus in Franche-Comt? they say that you should dance at the Carnival in order to make the hemp grow tall. In the Vosges mountains the sower of hemp pulls his nether garments up as far as he can, because he imagines that the hemp he is sowing will attain the precise height to which he has succeeded in hitching up his breeches; and in the same region another way of ensuring a good crop of hemp is to dance on the roof of the house on Twelfth Day. In Swabia and among the Transylvanian Saxons it is a common custom for a man who has sown hemp to leap high on the field, in the belief that this will make the hemp grow tall. All over Baden till recently it was the custom for the farmer's wife to give the sower a dish of eggs or a cake baked with eggs either before or after sowing, in order that he might leap as high as possible. This was deemed the best way of making the hemp grow high. For the same purpose some people who had sown hemp used to dance the hemp dance, as it was called, on Shrove Tuesday, and in this dance also the dancers jumped as high as they could. In some parts of Baden the hemp seed is thrown in the air as high as possible, and in Katzenthal the urchins leap over fires in order that the hemp may grow tall. Similarly in many other parts of Germany and Austria the peasant imagines that he makes the flax grow tall by dancing or leaping high, or by jumping backwards from a table; the higher the leap the taller will the flax be that year. The special season for thus promoting the growth of flax is Shrove Tuesday, but in some places it is Candlemas or Walpurgis Night . The scene of the performance is the flax field, the farmhouse, or the village tavern. In some parts of Eastern Prussia the girls dance one by one in a large hoop at midnight on Shrove Tuesday. The hoop is adorned with leaves, flowers, and ribbons, and attached to it are a small bell and some flax. Strictly speaking, the hoop should be wrapt in white linen handkerchiefs, but the place of these is often taken by many-coloured bits of cloth, wool, and so forth. While dancing within the hoop each girl has to wave her arms vigorously and cry "Flax grow!" or words to that effect. When she has done, she leaps out of the hoop, or is lifted out of it by her partner. In Anhalt, when the sower had sown the flax, he leaped up and flung the seed-bag high in the air, saying, "Grow and turn green! You have nothing else to do." He hoped that the flax would grow as high as he flung the seed-bag in the air. At Quellendorff, in Anhalt, the first bushel of seed-corn had to be heaped up high in order that the corn-stalks should grow tall and bear plenty of grain. When Macedonian farmers have done digging their fields, they throw their spades up into the air, and catching them again, exclaim, "May the crop grow as high as the spade has gone!"
The notion that a person can influence a plant homoeopathically by his act or condition comes out clearly in a remark made by a Malay woman. Being asked why she stripped the upper part of her body naked in reaping the rice, she explained that she did it to make the rice-husks thinner, as she was tired of pounding thick-husked rice. Clearly, she thought that the less clothing she wore the less husk there would be on the rice. Among the Minangkabauers of Sumatra, when a rice barn has been built a feast is held, of which a woman far advanced in pregnancy must partake. Her condition will obviously help the rice to be fruitful and multiply. Among the Zulus a pregnant woman sometimes grinds corn, which is afterwards burnt among the half-grown crops in order to fertilise them. For a similar reason in Syria when a fruit-tree does not bear, the gardener gets a pregnant woman to fasten a stone to one of its branches; then the tree will be sure to bear fruit, but the woman will run a risk of miscarriage, having transferred her fertility, or part of it, to the tree. The practice of loading with stones a tree which casts its fruit is mentioned by Maimonides, though the Rabbis apparently did not understand it. The proceeding was most probably a homoeopathic charm designed to load the tree with fruit. In Swabia they say that if a fruit-tree does not bear, you should keep it loaded with a heavy stone all summer, and next year it will be sure to bear. The custom of tying stones to fruit-trees in order to ensure a crop of fruit is followed also in Sicily. The magic virtue of a pregnant woman to communicate fertility is known to Bavarian and Austrian peasants, who think that if you give the first fruit of a tree to a woman with child to eat, the tree will bring forth abundantly next year. In Bohemia for a similar purpose the first apple of a young tree is sometimes plucked and eaten by a woman who has borne many children, for then the tree will be sure to bear many apples. In the Z?rcher Oberland, Switzerland, they think that a cherry-tree will bear abundantly if its first fruit is eaten by a woman who has just given birth to her first child. In Macedonia the first fruit of a tree should not be eaten by a barren woman but by one who has many children. The Nicobar Islanders think it lucky to get a pregnant woman and her husband to plant seed in gardens. The Greeks and Romans sacrificed pregnant victims to the goddesses of the corn and of the earth, doubtless in order that the earth might teem and the corn swell in the ear. When a Catholic priest remonstrated with the Indians of the Orinoco on allowing their women to sow the fields in the blazing sun, with infants at their breasts, the men answered, "Father, you don't understand these things, and that is why they vex you. You know that women are accustomed to bear children, and that we men are not. When the women sow, the stalk of the maize bears two or three ears, the root of the yucca yields two or three basketfuls, and everything multiplies in proportion. Now why is that? Simply because the women know how to bring forth, and know how to make the seed which they sow bring forth also. Let them sow, then; we men don't know as much about it as they do." For the same reason, probably, the Tupinambas of Brazil thought that if a certain earth-almond were planted by the men, it would not grow. Among the Ilocans of Luzon the men sow bananas, but the sower must have a young child on his shoulder, or the bananas will bear no fruit. When a tree bears no fruit, the Galelareese think it is a male; and their remedy is simple. They put a woman's petticoat on the tree, which, being thus converted into a female, will naturally prove prolific. On the other hand the Baganda believe that a barren wife infects her husband's garden with her own sterility and prevents the trees from bearing fruit; hence a childless woman is generally divorced. For a like reason, probably, the Wajagga of East Africa throw away the corpse of a childless woman, with all her belongings, in the forest or in any other place where the land is never cultivated; moreover her body is not carried out of the door of the hut, but a special passage is broken for it through the wall, no doubt to prevent her dangerous ghost from finding its way back.
Thus on the theory of homoeopathic magic a person can influence vegetation either for good or for evil according to the good or the bad character of his acts or states: for example, a fruitful woman makes plants fruitful, a barren woman makes them barren. Hence this belief in the noxious and infectious nature of certain personal qualities or accidents has given rise to a number of prohibitions or rules of avoidance: people abstain from doing certain things lest they should homoeopathically infect the fruits of the earth with their own undesirable state or condition. All such customs of abstention or rules of avoidance are examples of negative magic or taboo. Thus, for example, arguing from what may be called the infectiousness of personal acts or states, the Galelareese say that you ought not to shoot with a bow and arrows under a fruit-tree, or the tree will cast its fruit even as the arrows fall to the ground; and that when you are eating water-melon you ought not to mix the pips which you spit out of your mouth with the pips which you have put aside to serve as seed; for if you do, though the pips you spat out may certainly spring up and blossom, yet the blossoms will keep falling off just as the pips fell from your mouth, and thus these pips will never bear fruit. Precisely the same train of thought leads the Bavarian peasant to believe that if he allows the graft of a fruit-tree to fall on the ground, the tree that springs from that graft will let its fruit fall untimely. The Indians of Santiago Tepehuacan suppose that if a single grain of the maize which they are about to sow were eaten by an animal, the birds and the wild boars would come and devour all the rest, and nothing would grow. And if any of these Indians has ever in his life buried a corpse, he will never be allowed to plant a fruit-tree, for they say that the tree would wither. And they will not let such a man go fishing with them, for the fish would flee from him. Clearly these Indians imagine that anybody who has buried a corpse is thereby tainted, so to say, with an infection of death, which might prove fatal to fruits and fish. In Nias, the day after a man has made preparations for planting rice he may not use fire, or the crop would be parched; he may not spread his mats on the ground, or the young plants would droop towards the earth. When the Chams of Cochinchina are sowing their dry rice-fields and desire that no rain should fall, they eat their rice dry instead of moistening it, as they usually do, with the water in which vegetables and fish have been boiled. That prevents rain from spoiling the rice.
In the foregoing cases a person is supposed to influence vegetation homoeopathically. He infects trees or plants with qualities or accidents, good or bad, resembling and derived from his own. But on the principle of homoeopathic magic the influence is mutual: the plant can infect the man just as much as the man can infect the plant. In magic, as I believe in physics, action and reaction are equal and opposite. The Cherokee Indians are adepts in practical botany of the homoeopathic sort. Thus wiry roots of the catgut plant or devil's shoestring are so tough that they can almost stop a ploughshare in the furrow. Hence Cherokee women wash their heads with a decoction of the roots to make the hair strong, and Cherokee ball-players wash themselves with it to toughen their muscles. To help them to spring quickly to their feet when they are thrown to the ground, these Indian ball-players also bathe their limbs with a decoction of the small rush , which, they say, always recovers its erect position, no matter how often it is trampled down. To improve a child's memory the Cherokees beat up burs in water which has been fetched from a roaring waterfall. The virtue of the potion is threefold. The voice of the Long Man or river-god is heard in the roar of the cataract; the stream seizes and holds things cast upon its surface; and there is nothing that sticks like a bur. Hence it seems clear that with the potion the child will drink in the lessons taught by the voice of the waters, will seize them like the stream, and stick fast to them like a bur. For a like reason the Cherokee fisherman ties the plant called Venus' flytrap to his fishtrap, and he chews the plant and spits it on the bait. That will be sure to make the trap and the bait catch fish, just as Venus' flytrap catches and digests the insects which alight on it. The Kei islanders think that certain creepers which adhere firmly to the trunks of trees prevent voyagers at sea from being wafted hither and thither at the mercy of the wind and the waves; the adhesive power of the plants enables the mariners to go straight to their destination. It is a Galelareese belief that if you eat a fruit which has fallen to the ground, you will yourself contract a disposition to stumble and fall; and that if you partake of something which has been forgotten , you will become forgetful. The Galelareese are also of opinion that if a woman were to consume two bananas growing from a single head she would give birth to twins. The Guarani Indians of South America thought that a woman would become a mother of twins if she ate a double grain of millet. In Vedic times a curious application of this principle supplied a charm by which a banished prince might be restored to his kingdom. He had to eat food cooked on a fire which was fed with wood which had grown out of the stump of a tree which had been cut down. The recuperative power manifested by such a tree would in due course be communicated through the fire to the food, and so to the prince, who ate the food which was cooked on the fire which was fed with the wood which grew out of the tree. Among the Lku?gen Indians of Vancouver Island an infallible means of making your hair grow long is to rub it with fish oil and the pulverised fruit of a particular kind of poplar . As the fruit grows a long way up the tree, it cannot fail to make your hair grow long too. At Allumba, in Central Australia, there is a tree to which the sun, in the shape of a woman, is said to have travelled from the east. The natives believe that if the tree were destroyed, they would all be burned up; and that were any man to kill and eat an opossum from this tree, the food would burn up all his inward parts so that he would die. The Sundanese of the Indian Archipelago regard certain kinds of wood as unsuitable for use in house-building, especially such trees as have prickles or thorns on their trunks. They think that the life of people who lived in a house made of such timber would be thorny and full of trouble. Again, if a house is built of trees that have fallen, or lost their leaves through age, the inmates would die soon or would be hard put to it to earn their bread. Again, wood from a house that has been burnt down should never be used in building, for it would cause a fire to break out in the new house. In Java some people would not build a house with the wood of a tree that has been uprooted by a storm, lest the house should fall down in like manner; and they take care not to construct the upright and the horizontal parts of the edifice out of the same tree. The reason for this precaution is a belief that if the standing and lying woodwork was made out of the same tree, the inmates of the house would constantly suffer from ill health; no sooner had one of them got up from a bed of sickness than another would have to lie down on it; and so it would go on, one up and another down, perpetually. Before Cherokee braves went forth to war the medicine-man used to give each man a small charmed root which made him absolutely invulnerable. On the eve of battle the warrior bathed in a running stream, chewed a portion of the root and spat the juice on his body in order that the bullets might slide from his skin like the drops of water. Some of my readers perhaps doubt whether this really made the men bomb-proof. There is a barren and paralysing spirit of scepticism abroad at the present day which is most deplorable. However, the efficacy of this particular charm was proved in the Civil War, for three hundred Cherokees served in the army of the South; and they were never, or hardly ever, wounded in action. Near Charlotte Waters, in Central Australia, there is a tree which sprang up to mark the spot where a blind man died. It is called the Blind Tree by the natives, who think that if it were cut down all the people of the neighbourhood would become blind. A man who wishes to deprive his enemy of sight need only go to the tree by himself and rub it, muttering his wish and exhorting the magic virtue to go forth and do its baleful work.
In this last example the infectious quality, though it emanates directly from a tree, is derived originally from a man--namely, the blind man--who was buried at the place where the tree grew. Similarly, the Central Australians believe that a certain group of stones at Undiara are the petrified boils of an old man who long ago plucked them from his body and left them there; hence any man who wishes to infect his enemy with boils will go to these stones and throw miniature spears at them, taking care that the points of the spears strike the stones. Then the spears are picked up, and thrown one by one in the direction of the person whom it is intended to injure. The spears carry with them the magic virtue from the stones, and the result is an eruption of painful boils on the body of the victim. Sometimes a whole group of people can be afflicted in this way by a skilful magician. These examples introduce us to a fruitful branch of homoeopathic magic, namely to that department of it which works by means of the dead; for just as the dead can neither see nor hear nor speak, so you may on homoeopathic principles render people blind, deaf, and dumb by the use of dead men's bones or anything else that is tainted by the infection of death. Thus among the Galelareese, when a young man goes a-wooing at night, he takes a little earth from a grave and strews it on the roof of his sweetheart's house just above the place where her parents sleep. This, he fancies, will prevent them from waking while he converses with his beloved, since the earth from the grave will make them sleep as sound as the dead. Burglars in all ages and many lands have been patrons of this species of magic, which is very useful to them in the exercise of their profession. Thus a South Slavonian housebreaker sometimes begins operations by throwing a dead man's bone over the house, saying, with pungent sarcasm, "As this bone may waken, so may these people waken"; after that not a soul in the house can keep his or her eyes open. Similarly, in Java the burglar takes earth from a grave and sprinkles it round the house which he intends to rob; this throws the inmates into a deep sleep. With the same intention a Hindoo will strew ashes from a pyre at the door of the house; Indians of Peru scatter the dust of dead men's bones; and Ruthenian burglars remove the marrow from a human shin-bone, pour tallow into it, and having kindled the tallow, march thrice round the house with this candle burning, which causes the inmates to sleep a death-like sleep. Or the Ruthenian will make a flute out of a human leg-bone and play upon it; whereupon all persons within hearing are overcome with drowsiness. The Indians of Mexico employed for this maleficent purpose the left fore-arm of a woman who had died in giving birth to her first child; but the arm had to be stolen. With it they beat the ground before they entered the house which they designed to plunder; this caused every one in the house to lose all power of speech and motion; they were as dead, hearing and seeing everything, but perfectly powerless; some of them, however, really slept and even snored. In Europe similar properties were ascribed to the Hand of Glory, which was the dried and pickled hand of a man who had been hanged. If a candle made of the fat of a malefactor who had also died on the gallows was lighted and placed in the Hand of Glory as in a candlestick, it rendered motionless all persons to whom it was presented; they could not stir a finger any more than if they were dead. Sometimes the dead man's hand is itself the candle, or rather bunch of candles, all its withered fingers being set on fire; but should any member of the household be awake, one of the fingers will not kindle. Such nefarious lights can only be extinguished with milk. Often it is prescribed that the thief's candle should be made of the finger of a new-born or, still better, unborn child; sometimes it is thought needful that the thief should have one such candle for every person in the house, for if he has one candle too little somebody in the house will wake and catch him. Once these tapers begin to burn, there is nothing but milk that will put them out. In the seventeenth century robbers used to murder pregnant women in order thus to extract candles from their wombs. An ancient Greek robber or burglar thought he could silence and put to flight the fiercest watchdogs by carrying with him a brand plucked from a funeral pyre.
Again, Servian and Bulgarian women who chafe at the restraints of domestic life will take the copper coins from the eyes of a corpse, wash them in wine or water, and give the liquid to their husbands to drink. After swallowing it, the husband will be as blind to his wife's peccadilloes as the dead man was on whose eyes the coins were laid. When a Blackfoot Indian went out eagle-hunting, he used to take a skull with him, because he believed that the skull would make him invisible, like the dead person to whom it had belonged, and so the eagles would not be able to see and attack him. The Tarahumares of Mexico are great runners, and parties of them engage in races with each other. They believe that human bones induce fatigue; hence before a race the friends of one side will bury dead men's bones in the track, hoping that the runners of the other side will pass over them and so be weakened. Naturally they warn their own men to shun the spot where the bones are buried. The Belep of New Caledonia think that they can disable an enemy from flight by means of the leg-bone of a dead foe. They stick certain plants into the bone, and then smash it between stones before the skulls of their ancestors. It is easy to see that this breaks the leg of the living enemy and so hinders him from running away. Hence in time of war men fortify themselves with amulets of this sort. The ancient Greeks seem to have thought that to set a young male child on a tomb would be to rob him of his manhood by infecting him with the impotence of the dead. And as there is no memory in the grave the Arabs think that earth from a grave can make a man forget his griefs and sorrows, especially the sorrow of an unhappy love.
Again, animals are often conceived to possess qualities or properties which might be useful to man, and homoeopathic or imitative magic seeks to communicate these properties to human beings in various ways. Thus some Bechuanas wear a ferret as a charm, because, being very tenacious of life, it will make them difficult to kill. Others wear a certain insect, mutilated, but living, for a similar purpose. Yet other Bechuana warriors wear the hair of a hornless ox among their own hair, and the skin of a frog on their mantle, because a frog is slippery, and the ox, having no horns, is hard to catch; so the man who is provided with these charms believes that he will be as hard to hold as the ox and the frog. Again, it seems plain that a South African warrior who twists tufts of rats' hair among his own curly black locks will have just as many chances of avoiding the enemy's spear as the nimble rat has of avoiding things thrown at it; hence in these regions rats' hair is in great demand when war is expected. In Morocco a fowl or a pigeon may sometimes be seen with a little red bundle tied to its foot; the bundle contains a charm, and it is believed that as the charm is kept in constant motion by the bird, a corresponding restlessness is kept up in the mind of him or her against whom the charm is directed. When a Galla sees a tortoise, he will take off his sandals and step on it, believing that the soles of his feet are thereby made hard and strong like the shell of the animal. The Wajaggas of Eastern Africa think that if they wear a piece of the wing-bone of a vulture tied round their leg they will be able to run and not grow weary, just as the vulture flies unwearied through the sky. The Esquimaux of Baffin Land fancy that if part of the intestines of a fox is placed under the feet of a baby boy, he will become active and skilful in walking over thin ice, like a fox. One of the ancient books of India prescribes that when a sacrifice is offered for victory, the earth out of which the altar is to be made should be taken from a place where a boar has been wallowing, since the strength of the boar will be in that earth. When you are playing the one-stringed lute, and your fingers are stiff, the thing to do is to catch some long-legged field spiders and roast them, and then rub your fingers with the ashes; that will make your fingers as lithe and nimble as the spiders' legs--at least so think the Galelareese. As the sea-eagle is very expert at seizing fish in its talons, the Kei islanders use its claws as a charm to enable them to make great gain on their trading voyages. The children of the Baronga on Delagoa Bay are much troubled by a small worm which burrows under their skin, where its meanderings are visible to the eye. To guard her little one against this insect pest a Baronga mother will attach to its wrist the skin of a mole which burrows just under the surface of the ground, exactly as the worm burrows under the infant's skin. To bring back a runaway slave an Arab of North Africa will trace a magic circle on the ground, stick a nail in the middle of it, and attach a beetle by a thread to the nail, taking care that the sex of the beetle is that of the fugitive. As the beetle crawls round and round it will coil the thread about the nail, thus shortening its tether and drawing nearer to the centre at every circuit. So by virtue of homoeopathic magic the runaway slave will be drawn back to his master. The Patagonian Indians kill a mare and put a new-born boy in its body, believing that this will make him a good horseman. The Lku?gen Indians of Vancouver's Island believe that the ashes of wasps rubbed on the faces of warriors going to battle will render the men as pugnacious as wasps, and that a decoction of wasps' nests or of flies administered internally to barren women will make them prolific like the insects.
The Huichol Indians of Mexico admire the beautiful markings on the backs of serpents. Hence when a Huichol woman is about to weave or embroider, her husband catches a large serpent and holds it in a cleft stick, while the woman strokes the reptile with one hand down the whole length of its back; then she passes the same hand over her forehead and eyes, that she may be able to work as beautiful patterns in the web as the markings on the back of the serpent. Among the Tarahumares of Mexico men who run races tie deer-hoofs to their backs in the belief that this will make them swift-footed like the deer. Cherokee ball-players rub their bodies with eel-skins in order to make themselves as slippery and hard to hold as eels; and they also apply land-tortoises to their legs in the hope of making them as thick and strong as the legs of these animals. But they are careful not to eat frogs, lest the brittleness of the frog's bones should infect their own bones. Moreover, they will not eat the flesh of the sluggish hog-sucker, lest they should lose their speed, nor the flesh of rabbits, lest, like the rabbit, they should become confused in running. On the other hand, their friends sprinkle a soup made of rabbit hamstrings along the path to be taken by their rivals, in order to make these rivals timorous in action. Moreover, the ball-players will not wear the feathers of the bald-headed buzzard, for fear of themselves becoming bald, nor turkey feathers, lest they should suffer from a goitrous growth on the throat like the red appendage on the throat of a turkey. The flesh of the common grey squirrel is forbidden to Cherokees who suffer from rheumatism, because the squirrel eats in a cramped position, which would clearly aggravate the pangs of the rheumatic patient. And a Cherokee woman who is with child may not eat the flesh of the ruffed grouse, because that bird hatches a large brood, but loses most of them before maturity. Strict people, indeed, will not allow a woman to taste of the bird till she is past child-bearing. When a Cherokee is starting on a journey on a cold winter morning he rubs his feet in the ashes of the fire and sings four verses by means of which he can set the cold at defiance, like the wolf, the deer, the fox, and the opossum, whose feet, so the Indians think, are never frost-bitten. After each verse he imitates the cry and action of the animal, thus homoeopathically identifying himself with the creature. The song he sings may be rendered, "I become a real wolf, a real deer, a real fox, and a real opossum." After stating that he has become a real wolf, the songster utters a prolonged howl and paws the ground like a wolf with his feet. After giving notice that he has become a real deer, he imitates the call and jumping of a deer. And after announcing his identification, for all practical purposes, with a fox and an opossum, he mimicks the barking and scratching of a fox and the cry of an opossum when it is driven to bay, also throwing his head back just as an opossum does when it feigns death. Some Cherokees are said to drink tea made of crickets in order to become good singers like the insects. If the eyes of a Cherokee child be bathed with water in which a feather of an owl has been soaked, the child will be able, like the owl, to keep awake all night. The mole-cricket has claws with which it burrows in the earth, and among the Cherokees it is reputed to be an excellent singer. Hence when children are long of learning to speak, their tongues are scratched with the claw of a live mole-cricket in order that they may soon talk as distinctly as the insect. Grown persons also, who are slow of speech, may acquire a ready flow of eloquence, if only the inside of their throat be scratched on four successive mornings with a mole-cricket. The negroes of the Maroni river in Guiana have a somewhat similar cure for stammering. Day and night the shrieks of a certain species of ape resound through the forest. Hence when the negroes kill one of these pests, they remove its larynx and make a cup out of it. If a stammering child drinks out of such a cup for a few months, it ceases to stammer. Cherokee parents scratch the hands of their children with the pincers of a live red crawfish, resembling a lobster, in order to give the infants a strong grip, like that of the crawfish. This may help us to understand why on the fifth day after birth a Greek child used to receive presents of octopuses and cuttle-fish from its friends and relations. For the numerous arms, legs, and tentacles of these creatures seem well calculated to strengthen the grip of a baby's hands and to impart the power of toddling to its little toes.
On the principle of homoeopathic magic, inanimate things, as well as plants and animals, may diffuse blessing or bane around them, according to their own intrinsic nature and the skill of the wizard to tap or dam, as the case may be, the stream of weal or woe. Thus, for example, the Galelareese think that when your teeth are being filed you should keep spitting on a pebble, for this establishes a homoeopathic connexion between you and the pebble, by virtue of which your teeth will henceforth be as hard and durable as a stone. On the other hand, you ought not to comb a child before it has teethed, for if you do, its teeth will afterwards be separated from each other like the teeth of a comb. Nor should children look at a sieve, otherwise they will suffer from a skin disease, and will have as many sores on their bodies as there are holes in the sieve. In Samaracand women give a baby sugar candy to suck and put glue in the palm of its hand, in order that, when the child grows up, his words may be sweet and precious things may stick to his hands as if they were glued. The Greeks thought that a garment made from the fleece of a sheep that had been torn by a wolf would hurt the wearer, setting up an itch or irritation in his skin. They were also of opinion that if a stone which had been bitten by a dog were dropped in wine, it would make all who drank of that wine to fall out among themselves. Among the Arabs of Moab a childless woman often borrows the robe of a woman who has had many children, hoping with the robe to acquire the fruitfulness of its owner. The Caffres of Sofala, in East Africa, had a great dread of being struck with anything hollow, such as a reed or a straw, and greatly preferred being thrashed with a good thick cudgel or an iron bar, even though it hurt very much. For they thought that if a man were beaten with anything hollow, his inside would waste away till he died. In eastern seas there is a large shell which the Buginese of Celebes call the "old man" . On Fridays they turn these "old men" upside down and place them on the thresholds of their houses, believing that whoever then steps over the threshold of the house will live to be old. Again, the Galelareese think that, if you are imprudent enough to eat while somebody is sharpening a knife, your throat will be cut that same evening, or next morning at latest. The disastrous influence thus attributed, under certain circumstances, to a knife in the East Indies, finds its counterpart in a curious old Greek story. A certain king had no child, and he asked a wise man how he could get one. The wise man himself did not know, but he thought that the birds of the air might, and he undertook to enquire of them. For you must know that the sage understood the language of birds, having learned it through some serpents whose life he had saved, and who, out of gratitude, had cleansed his ears as he slept. So he sacrificed two bulls, and cut them up, and prayed the fowls to come and feast on the flesh; only the vulture he did not invite. When the birds came, the wise man asked them what the king must do to get a son; but none of them knew. At last up came the vulture, and he knew all about it. He said that once when the king was a child his royal father was gelding rams in the field, and laid down the bloody knife beside his little son; nay, he threatened the boy with it. The child was afraid and ran away, and the father stuck the knife in a tree, either a sacred oak or a wild pear-tree. Meanwhile, the bark of the tree had grown round the knife and hidden it. The vulture said that if they found the knife, scraped the rust off it, and gave the rust, mixed with wine, to the king to drink for ten days, he would beget a son. They did so, and it fell out exactly as the vulture had said. In this story a knife which had gelded rams is supposed to have deprived a boy of his virility merely by being brought near his person. Through simple proximity it infected him, so to say, with the same disability which it had already inflicted on the rams; and the loss he thus sustained was afterwards repaired by administering to him in a potion the rust which, having been left on the blade by the blood of the animals, might be supposed to be still imbued with their generative faculty.
But while a general magical efficacy may be supposed to reside in all stones by reason of their common properties of weight and solidity, special magical virtues are attributed to particular stones, or kinds of stone, in accordance with their individual or specific qualities of shape and colour. For example, a pot-hole in a rocky gorge of Central Australia contains many rounded boulders which, in the opinion of the Warramunga tribe, represent the kidneys, heart, tail, intestines, and so forth of an old euro, a species of kangaroo. Hence the natives jump into the pool, and after splashing the water all over their bodies rub one another with the stones, believing that this will enable them to catch euros. Again, not very far from Alice Springs, in Central Australia, there is a heap of stones supposed to be the vomit of two men of the eagle-hawk totem who had dined too copiously on eagle-hawk men, women, and children. The natives think that if any person caught sight of these stones he would be taken very sick on the spot; hence the heap is covered with sticks, to which every passer-by adds one in order to prevent the evil magic from coming out and turning his stomach. The Indians of Peru employed certain stones for the increase of maize, others for the increase of potatoes, and others again for the increase of cattle. The stones used to make maize grow were fashioned in the likeness of cobs of maize, and the stones destined to multiply cattle had the shape of sheep.
No people perhaps employ stones more freely for the purposes of homoeopathic magic than the natives of New Caledonia. They have stones of the most diverse shapes and colours to serve the most diverse ends--stones for sunshine, rain, famine, war, madness, death, fishing, sailing, and so forth. Thus in order to make a plantation of taro thrive they bury in the field certain stones resembling taros, praying to their ancestors at the same time. A stone marked with black lines like the leaves of the coco-nut palm helps to produce a good crop of coco-nuts. To make bread-fruit grow they use two stones of different sizes representing the unripe and the ripe fruit respectively. As soon as the fruit begins to form, they bury the small stone at the foot of the tree; and later on, when the fruit approaches maturity, they replace the small stone by the large one. The yam is the chief crop of the New Caledonians; hence the number of stones used to foster its growth is correspondingly great. Different families have different kinds of stones which, according to their diverse shapes and colours, are supposed to promote the cultivation of the various species of yams. Before the stones are buried in the yam field they are deposited beside the ancestral skulls, wetted with water, and wiped with the leaves of certain trees. Sacrifices, too, of yams and fish are offered to the dead, with the words, "Here are your offerings, in order that the crop of yams may be good." Again, a stone carved in the shape of a canoe can make a voyage prosperous or the reverse according as it is placed before the ancestral skulls with the opening upwards or downwards, the ceremony being accompanied with prayers and offerings to the dead. Again, fish is a very important article of diet with the New Caledonians, and every kind of fish has its sacred stone, which is enclosed in a large shell and kept in the graveyard. In performing the rite to secure a good catch, the wizard swathes the stone in bandages of various colours, spits some chewed leaves on it, and, setting it up before the skulls, says, "Help us to be lucky at the fishing." In these and many similar practices of the New Caledonians the magical efficacy of the stones appears to be deemed insufficient of itself to accomplish the end in view; it has to be reinforced by the spirits of the dead, whose help is sought by prayer and sacrifice. Moreover, the stones are regularly kept in the burial-grounds, as if to saturate them with the powerful influence of the ancestors; they are brought from the cemetery to be buried in the fields or at the foot of trees for the sake of quickening the fruits of the earth, and they are restored to the cemetery when they have discharged this duty. Thus in New Caledonia magic is blent with the worship of the dead.
In other parts of Melanesia a like belief prevails that certain sacred stones are endowed with miraculous powers which correspond in their nature to the shape of the stone. Thus a piece of water-worn coral on the beach often bears a surprising likeness to a bread-fruit. Hence in the Banks Islands a man who finds such a coral will lay it at the root of one of his bread-fruit trees in the expectation that it will make the tree bear well. If the result answers his expectation, he will then, for a proper remuneration, take stones of less-marked character from other men and let them lie near his, in order to imbue them with the magic virtue which resides in it. Similarly, a stone with little discs upon it is good to bring in money; and if a man found a large stone with a number of small ones under it, like a sow among her litter, he was sure that to offer money upon it would bring him pigs. In these and similar cases the Melanesians ascribe the marvellous power, not to the stone itself, but to its indwelling spirit; and sometimes, as we have just seen, a man endeavours to propitiate the spirit by laying down offerings on the stone. But the conception of spirits that must be propitiated lies outside the sphere of magic, and within that of religion. Where such a conception is found, as here, in conjunction with purely magical ideas and practices, the latter may generally be assumed to be the original stock on which the religious conception has been at some later time engrafted. For there are strong grounds for thinking that, in the evolution of thought, magic has preceded religion. But to this point we shall return presently.
The ancients set great store on the magical qualities of precious stones; indeed it has been maintained, with great show of reason, that such stones were used as amulets long before they were worn as mere ornaments. Thus the Greeks gave the name of tree-agate to a stone which exhibits tree-like markings, and they thought that if two of these gems were tied to the horns or neck of oxen at the plough, the crop would be sure to be plentiful. Again, they recognised a milk-stone which produced an abundant supply of milk in women if only they drank it dissolved in honey-mead. Milk-stones are used for the same purpose by Greek women in Crete and Melos at the present day; in Albania nursing mothers wear the stones in order to ensure an abundant flow of milk. In Lechrain down to modern times German women have attempted to increase their milk by stroking their breasts with a kind of alum which they call a milk-stone. Again, the Greeks believed in a stone which cured snake-bites, and hence was named the snake-stone; to test its efficacy you had only to grind the stone to powder and sprinkle the powder on the wound. The wine-coloured amethyst received its name, which means "not drunken," because it was supposed to keep the wearer of it sober; and two brothers who desired to live at unity were advised to carry magnets about with them, which, by drawing the twain together, would clearly prevent them from falling out. In Albania people think that if the blood-stone is laid on a wound it will stop the flow of blood.
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